Heartbeat

Heartbeat is a key component in Linux high availability architectures, often used alongside DRBD and Pacemaker to enhance service resilience.

## Node Presence Monitoring and Management

Heartbeat enables you to actively monitor the presence or absence of nodes within a cluster. It quickly detects failures and informs you so critical services can continue running without interruption.

## Inter-Node Communication

Heartbeat facilitates message exchanges between nodes, ensuring smooth and reliable coordination among your clustered servers.

## Integration with DRBD and Pacemaker

• With DRBD (Distributed Replicated Block Device), Heartbeat helps maintain mirrored storage between two servers by synchronizing data in real time. This combination provides you with a robust redundant storage solution where Heartbeat manages automatic failover when the primary server becomes unavailable.
• With Pacemaker, Heartbeat collaborates to manage cluster resources by starting and stopping services such as IP addresses or web servers, ensuring dynamic high availability of your applications.

By using Heartbeat together with DRBD or Pacemaker, you can deploy a reliable Linux cluster architecture that maintains continuous service availability even in the event of hardware or software failures. This tool synergy is widely adopted in system administration for critical environments.